The Sony FE 85mm F1.8 is an affordable lens in a focal length that's ideal for portraits. Images are crisp, with pleasing blurred backgrounds when shot at a wide aperture.

Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

The Sony FE 85mm F1.8 is an affordable lens in a focal length that's ideal for portraits.
Images are crisp, with pleasing blurred backgrounds when shot at a wide aperture.

8 Jun 2017Jim Fisher

Full-frame Sony mirrorless photographers have a wide range of prime lens options in the short telephoto range, but most of them carry a premium price tag. The FE 85mm F1.8 comes in at an attractive $599.99 cost compared with premium options like the $1,200 Zeiss Batis 1.8/85 and $1,800 Sony FE 85mm F1.4 GM, both of which have earned Editors' Choice honors. The FE 85mm F1.8 captures images that are sharper than the Batis, albeit with a stronger vignette and without in-lens stabilization. It's half the cost, so we're giving it the same rating and Editors' Choice honors.

Design

The FE 85mm is a squat, compact lens, measuring in at 3.2 by 3.1 inches (HD) and tipping the scales at just 13.1 ounces. Its black barrel is aluminum with a knurled focus ring. A lens hood is included—it reverses for storage—and the front element supports 67mm filters. The squat, light lens balances quite well on the a7R II.

Like other FE lenses, the 85mm F1.8 covers the full-frame sensor used by cameras in the a7 II family, and is protected from dust and moisture. It also shares the same focus-by-wire system as other Sony mirrorless lenses. When set to manual focus mode, turning the focus ring activates a motor to move focusing elements rather than turning the elements themselves. If you prefer the tactile feel of manual mechanical focus, consider the Zeiss Loxia 2.4/85 as an alternative, but remember that the Loxia series doesn't support autofocus.

Physical controls are scant. There's a simple MF/AF toggle switch to change the focus mode, and a button to activate Focus Hold. Holding it down pauses the camera's autofocus system, allowing you to recompose a shot after focus is acquired without fiddling with the camera's settings. The button can be reconfigured if desired—I like to set it to activate Sony's Eye AF system, which identifies human eyes and locks focus, ideal for portraiture.

The FE 85mm doesn't boast its own optical stabilization system, so if you own an E-mount camera without in-body stabilization, you'll want to think about spending more on the Batis, especially if you plan to use the 85mm for handheld video. More recent full-frame bodies, as well as the APS-C a6500, include in-body image stabilization, mitigating the omission.

The lens supports a 2.6-foot (0.8-meter) minimum focus distance. That keeps it out of macro territory—Sony has the FE 90mm F2.8 G OSS for that—but it's a fine working distance for portraiture, the bread and butter of a wide-aperture 85mm design.

Image Quality

I tested the FE 85mm F1.8 with the 42MP a7r II using Imatest. At f/1.8 the lens scores 3,462 lines per picture height on the standard center-weighted sharpness test, much better than the 2,200 lines we want to see at a minimum from a high-resolution camera like the a7R II. The center is extremely sharp (3,898 lines), but as you move away there's a drop in fidelity, with the average dipping to 2,861 lines in the mid parts and periphery. At f/1.8 the Batis isn't as sharp, notching 2,918 lines on the same test, but its scores are much more even across the frame.

You don't get a big bump in sharpness by stopping down to f/2.8 or f/4, where scores are similar. There's a modest bump in resolution at f/5.6 (3,809 lines), and you get peak performance at f/8 (4,146 lines) and f/11 (4,194 lines). Scores drop at f/16 (3,870 lines) and f/22 (2,738 lines). The Batis is also at its best at f/11, but it's not as good as the FE 85mm, recording 3,565 lines.

As you can see from the pixel-level crop above, the lens is tack sharp, even at f/1.8. Depth of field is quite shallow, of course, so not all of your image will be in focus, unless you're shooting a perfectly flat subject. The crop is taken from the mid parts of the frame, in between the center and periphery. We'll have to wait for formal lab testing to see how evenly sharp it is, but 85mm designs are typically pretty even in clarity from the center to the periphery.

Out-of-focus highlights do take on a cat's-eye shape toward the edges of the frame. This is in contrast to Sony's other new portrait lens, the FE 100mm F2.8 STF GM OSS, which features a special lens element that adds feather blur, creating perfectly circular highlights behind your subject. But perfectly round highlights are uncommon. The pricier Zeiss Batis 1.8/85 shows a similar effect, and while the shape isn't as extreme, Sony's top-end FE 85mm F1.4 GM does as well.

The FE 85mm doesn't exhibit any visible distortion. It does show dim corners when shooting in Raw format or with in-camera illumination correction disabled for JPG files. At f/1.8 corners are visibly dark, lagging behind the center of the image by 3 f-stops (-3EV). The deficit is cut to -2.6EV at f/2, -1.4EV at f/2.8, and -1.2EV at f/4. At narrower apertures they are within our -1EV tolerance. Enabling in-camera correction leaves a slight vignette at f/1.8 (-1.3EV) and f/2 (-1.1EV), but it's gone after that. The Batis is a bit better when shooting Raw, showing -1.8EV at f/1.8 and -1.4EV at f/2, and illuminating the frame evenly at narrower settings.

Conclusions

Sony mirrorless photographers have a lot of options in the 85 to 100mm focal range, and they're all good lenses. Choosing one may be difficult, but the FE 85mm F1.8 certainly wins out on price, coming in at about half the cost of the Zeiss Batis 1.8/85, and bettering it in sharpness. The FE 85mm also delivers fast autofocus, a dust- and moisture-resistant build, and distortion-free images. Corners are dim when shooting in Raw format, but that's easy enough to correct using software, and JPG photographers enjoy in-camera compensation. If you use a camera without in-body stabilization, you may find it worth it to spend more on the Batis 1.8/85. But for everyone else, the FE 85mm F1.8 is an exceptional value, an excellent performer, and our Editors' Choice.

About the Author

Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007.

He honed his writing skills at retailer B&H Photo, where he wrote thousands upon thousands of product descriptions, blog posts, and reviews. Since then he's shot with hundreds of camera models, ranging from pocket point-and-shoots to medium format digital cameras. And he's reviewed almost all of them. When he's not testing cameras and gear for PCMag, he's likely out and about shooting with ... See Full Bio